Eric Limer

Paranoid? Privacy conscious? Somewhere in between? Well there's now an unlocked (forked) Android phone for you. Blackphone is on the scene and it looks as discrete as it keeps all your juicy info.

We heard about Blackphone a while ago, but now SilentCircle and Geeksphone have officially unveiled it at Mobile World Congress with a starting price of $630 and a body that's actually pretty sweet. Running a forked version of Android called PrivatOS, Blackphone mixes the power and app ecosystem of Google's mobile OS with a layer of security-saving software designed to keep the creepers off your back.

Privacy is at the forefront of everybody's mind, now more than ever. So Blackphone, which will …
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Blackphone's custom suite of apps centers mostly around Silent Phone for encrypted VoIP; Silent Text, for encrypted messaging; and Silent Contacts, for an encrypted contact list other apps can't peek at. All of these are available on iOS and vanilla Android for a price, but a Blackphone comes with two years of service included.

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As for the phone itself, it's a subtle, sleek little guy, with some pretty decent specs, at least so far as Silent Circle and Geeksphone are willing to talk about them: A 4.7-inch HD (resolution unknown), IPS display, a 2GHz quad-core processor, 16GB of storage, an 8-megapixel camera, LTE. All the essentials.

But don't plan on trying to hide from the NSA. While Blackphone is privacy conscious, it's not fool-proof. SilentCircle openly admits that no phone is NSA-proof. Besides, adopting a whole bunch of encryption is basically begging the NSA to come breathe down your neck.

But if you're looking to keep your data to yourself and away from less sophisticated snoops like data-harvesting apps and run-of-the-mill cyberstalkers, Blackphone's got your back. You can preorder one starting today. [Wired UK]